Trump would be losing this race in a big way even if there were no pandemic

If you’re hoping that a decisive win against Donald Trump and GOP candidates down the ballot would force a reckoning for the Republican Party, you’d likely be disappointed if that outcome comes to pass in November. But more mainstream Republicans would also blame a big loss on factors other than Trump’s corruption, bigotry and narcissism. The conventional wisdom would likely coalesce around the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic, and its ensuing economic meltdown, doomed Trump’s otherwise strong chances of re-election. Trump, who has been promising to enact a comprehensive healthcare plan since the 2016 campaign, has largely gotten a pass on this effort because the Dems have had so many other, more immediate lines of attack to press–from the regime’s botched response to the pandemic to Trump deploying unidentified federal troops to quell protests to his corruption of the Department of Justice to his current campaign to delegitimize the vote and hobble the Postal Service. It’s safe to say that they’d be hammering Trump for stripping health insurance from 23 million people, killing subsidies and copay-free preventive healthcare and removing protections for people with pre-existing conditions because promising to protect and expand the ACA was the Democrats’ central strategy when they won their biggest midterm victory ever in 2018.